Originally Posted by
SilverChris
Of course they're aware. SQ management is not blind to the overcrowding that happens every night. It's not a new issue by any stretch of imagination. The problem, as with most airports around the world, is that getting contiguous in-terminal floor space is a very big and expensive challenge. There just isn't any meaningful space left in T3, unless they plan on taking over one of the third-party lounges. That's a lot easier said than done, and there's the question of what they'd do with a small, awkward, "satellite" lounge.
Until T5 opens in the next decade, I don't see any meaningful improvement to SQ's lounge situation. They could of course assign more peak hour flights to T2, but then the lounge situation there is similarly dire.
I gather they dithered in their planning process and couldn't decide if they wanted to take over the adjacent Sats lounge space. By the time they decided they wanted to, Sats had already completed a renovation, and therefore wanted significant compensation from SIA to take it over. Such is the relationship between SIA and Sats nowadays.
In retrospect, it may still have been cheaper to just bite the bullet and pay the compensation as they now have a lounge facility which at opening is already beyond its capacity limits.